“We bombarded Ismailia, Suez, Port Said and Port Fuad. A million and a half refugees… Please be serious. Did you not know that the entire valley of Jordan had been emptied of its inhabitants as a result of the war of attrition?”
— General Gur, former chief of staff of the Israeli Army. Excerpted from Edward W. Said’s The Question of Palestine
The turbulent and tragic Barabas, a wealthy Jew, who is the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s memorable play The Jew of Malta, first performed around 1592, and the inimitable Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, written in the summer of 1598, are cast explicitly in the Machiavellian mould. In fact, they are the first among many such stage villains who appear in European literature defined by their scheming ambition and unscrupulous quest for power. Crafty, cunning, cruel, vindictive, even bloodthirsty, they nurtured an acerbic hatred for all Christians. As Shylock fulminated, his target was Antonio, “I hate him for he is a Christian... He hates our sacred nation.” Barabas, too, before meeting his calamitous end, voiced the vituperative “Damned Christian dogs” and added three more words to this
condemnation “and Turkish infidels!” Christians, too, exhibited the same
intense disgust for the “misbeliever, cut-throat” Jew.
Expectedly enough, the Nazis professed a special love for The Merchant of Venice though in their own devilish manner. They applauded the portrayal of Shylock as the indelible archetype of the villainous Jew and refused to accept his daughter Jessica as someone who was born a Jew, even after she accepted Christianity as her new religion in order to be united with her Christian lover, Lorenzo. Barabas, however, much more vitriolic, arranged the death of Lodowick, his daughter Abigail’s Christian lover, and then poisoned Abigail herself. A young neo-Nazi student of English Literature once told me in Stuttgart, “Concentrate on the character of Barabas to realise how insufferable a Jew could ever be!”
It took almost two long centuries (187 years to be exact) to oppose and challenge this overwhelming, despicable image of the Jewish moneylender prowling in the dark alleys of London, Paris, Venice and Rome. The challenge was articulated by the unforgettable Jewish-German dramatist, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), a dedicated Kantian product of the Enlightenment. In his evergreen play Nathan der Weise/Nathan the Wise published in 1779 and first performed in 1783 in Berlin, he presented his Jewish protagonist, Nathan, as an adamant secular humanist, who propagated amity and togetherness among the three great Semitic religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam. While Israel plans to invade the Gaza strip provoking horrific consequences, while we recall the ravages that had been committed against the Palestinians since 1948, we pause for a moment and recall Nathan’s stirring, corrective reminder:
We did not choose a nation for ourselves,
Are we our nations? What’s a nation then?
Where Jews and Christians such, e’er they were men?
And have I found in thee one more,
(Muslim) to whom
It is enough to be a man.
The events of the play take place during the Third Crusade. The great Sultan Saladin (comparable to our majestic Akbar) captured Jerusalem after the decisive Battle of Hattin in 1187. But — and let us not forget this truth at this bitter moment — he invited European Christians to visit Jerusalem as pilgrims. Spendthrift Saladin sought the help of the affluent Nathan to tide over his financial crisis, and the very first question the Ayyubid Sultan put to the humanist Jew, again in the tone and tenor of Akbar, was “Tell me, which and what is the true religion?” In order to answer this inscrutable question, Nathan answered with a “fairy tale”, the so-called “ring parable”. This very parable, which involved the bequest of three rings to three sons, as imperishable tokens of filial love, compared the threesome inheritance to the three great Semitic religions, all equally blessed and equally divine. Nathan’s message was elementary and basic, “Each of us lives by the religion we have learned from those we respect.”
We do not feel surprised to note that Goebbels detested Lessing and his Nathan der Weise. He summarily ordered its burning. But in these dark days and nights, I derive enormous, redemptive, succour by reading this play, especially its last scene, wherein Muslim Saladin embraces his nephew, Assad, in a display of abundant love, who was once regarded mistakenly as a Christian Templar. Lessing wrote yet another one-act play Die Juden/The Jews (1749) in which Jews rescue a group of Christians who are in danger.
After Lessing, the Austrian-Jewish dramatist, Franz Seraphim Grillparzer (1791-1872), wrote the play Die Judin von Toledo/The Jewess from Toledo in 1851. It was transformed into a novel by the remarkable writer, Jewish-Communist and Bertolt Brecht’s close collaborator, Lion Feuchtwanger. The theme of this novel and drama, based on an actual event in Spanish history, is the tragic infatuation of a Christian king for a Jewish woman. The latter is killed at the vengeful Queen’s command. This outcome again highlights the severe antagonism that prevailed
between the two faiths. But before setting into novel Grillparzer’s play, Feuchtwanger had himself written, as early as in 1933, the novel Die Geschwister Oppenheim/The Siblings Oppenheim in which he documented and described the sufferings and tribulations of his fellow Jews in Nazi Germany. Obviously, Feuchtwanger was forced to go into exile like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Incidentally, he, with Brecht’s assistance, wrote the one and only German play on colonial Bengal, Calcutta, 4th May, where they both unmasked the cruel, hypocritical visage of Warren Hastings and British mercantile colonialism.
Of course, the great Lessing and Feuchtwanger were rejected with phenomenal hatred. Or how else could six million Jews be exterminated in Nazi Germany? Recent historical research, especially the searchings of Brecht’s rebellious pupil, Heiner Muller, seem to indicate that the Anglo-American leaders were somewhat aware of what was transpiring in Auschwitz and Belsen, Treblinka and Dachau.
In order to atone for their innumerable sins and crimes against the Jews, which the white, racist Christian world had perpetrated for centuries, they created, led by the British in true late impenalist style, a so-called sovereign “Israel” state. Renowned political scientist Partha Chatterjee would rather describe it as a “colony” forcibly planted in Arab-Palestinian territory. Since then, in 1948, the macabre drama began.
But I am neither a historian nor a political scientist. Chatterjee has penned an admirable chronological evaluation of this curse extending for decades recently in a Bengali daily. I, myself, would like to terminate my cogitations by referring to two combative, protesting pillars Gunter Grass and Edward Said. Grass, the most gifted novelist of post-war Europe, was my personal friend.
Discarding the customary, typical German evasiveness on the question of Jews, he told me, “You have read my novels and poems. As a reader, you have experienced my severe indictment of Nazi barbarism against the Jews. Along with Einstein, I subscribed to the thesis that the homeless persecuted Jews deserved a homeland. But even after saying this, I affirm, unequivocally, the creation of a comprehensive Palestinian state, return of occupied Palestinian regions and an immediate cessation of Zionist depredation. I must add that my outspoken poem on this subject, Was gesagt werden muss/What must be said, raised a tornado of abuse in Israel and I became the target of visceral Zionist denunciation.”
Edward Said, in his compelling The Question of Palestine, engaged himself in an accusatory, comparative estimate. In his words, “In sheer historical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionist… what is much worse in my opinion, is the hypocrisy of Western (and certainly liberal Zionist) journalism and intellectual discourse, which have barely had anything to say about Zionist terror.”
Like Hanan Ashrawi, the one-time prime spokesman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), and George Habash, who was the founder of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Said was also a non-Muslim. This towering and erudite figure, author of the magisterial Orientalism, wrote in the most fervid terms on the condition of exile in his book Reflections on Exile and other Essays (2000). His words of searing anguish, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”, cross the territory of personal experience and turn into the collective, agonised expression of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who are barely surviving in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and above all, in the two huge prison-chambers of Jerusalem and Gaza.
